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The following is a guest blog post by Cristina Dafonte, Marketing Associate of Stericycle Communication Solutionsas part of the Communication Solutions Series of blog posts. Follow and engage with them on Twitter:@StericycleCommsEverything around us is customizable: your laptop background, the layout of applications on your phone, any product dashboard you have access to. Customization sells, and consumers crave it. Consumers love to think that something is unique or special for just them, even if they know in their hearts that isn’t the case.

Patient engagement, especially appointment reminders, shouldn’t be the exception to the rule. We’ve far surpassed the days of the robo-dialer letting you know your doctor’s office was calling. Today, patients look for custom communications.

There are two ends of the spectrum that I have seen with customization of appointment reminders. The first is no customization at all.

Example: My dentist sends an email that is “Please click to confirm your appointment. We look forward to seeing you!” And includes a large CONFIRM button.

This message leaves me wondering a few things: when is my appointment? Which dentist am I seeing? What if I need to reschedule? What kind of appointment did I schedule? The message wasn’t personalized to my appointment or to me.

The second end of the spectrum is too much customization. I didn’t know it was possible to personalize a message too much until I received the following text message from my eye doctor:

(1/2) Hi Cristina, your contacts are ready for pick up. Please stop by the office at your earliest convenience to get them. Our office hours are 7-3pm on the first Monday of every month, 8-4pm every

(2/2) other Tuesday, and 8-6pm on the second Thursday of every month, and 7-12pm on Friday. Thank you for choosing [my eye doctor].

The first time I received that text message, I read it at least 3 times, trying to figure out what the office hours were for the day I needed to go get my contacts! That, my friends, is a reminder with too much customization.

Fortunately, the team at Stericycle Communication Solutions has figured out just the right amount of customization. Our patient communications are built on 4 pillars:

Arrive: what needs to be done when the patient arrives

Bring: what they need to bring for the appointment

Prep: if there is any pre-appointment prep work that needs to be completed

Do: any specific instructions for the patient’s arrival.

These best practices ensure that the patient feels the communication is specifically for them and that they have enough information to confidently and comfortably arrive at the office – without feeling bombarded with facts or instructions.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

The following is a guest blog post by Cristina Dafonte, Marketing Associate of Stericycle Communication Solutionsas part of the Communication Solutions Series of blog posts. Follow and engage with them on Twitter:@StericycleComms
Have you ever heard the story of the person who makes a New Year’s Resolution to exercise more and eat healthy, buys themselves a cool new gadget to stay motivated, a fresh new pair of sneakers, and then has already failed by February? This person is me – in February of 2017, I have fallen victim to every New Year’s Resolution stereotype in existence.

Last week, after eating half of a “family sized” bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and thinking about how frustrated I was that I couldn’t eat healthy for a whole two months, someone gave me a bit of great advice. They told me to write down what I had learned since January.

Lesson 1:

I love Cool Ranch Doritos and I have no self-control over my hand-to-mouth motion when I am around them.

Lesson 2:

Eating half of a family sized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos is guaranteed to make you feel extremely sick.

Lesson 3:

My “stay motivated” gadget is way cooler than I thought.

I bought myself a FitBit Charge 2 so that I could not only monitor the number of steps I took, but also monitor my heart rate while exercising. I had no idea why this was important, but my triathlete boyfriend had a heart rate monitor, so I wanted one too.

After about 1 week with my new FitBit, I was hooked. I was monitoring my heart rate all day, everyday. I wanted to know where my peak heart rate was and how far it was from my resting heart rate. I used the customized “relax” feature on my FitBit, which took me through guided breathing exercises to lower my heart rate. The FitBit also calculates how many hours you sleep and how many calories you burn while running, all based on my heart rate! I was amazed on how much I learned about my body just by watching my heart rate, which led me and my #HIT mind to thinking about how this data could or should be shared with my primary care doctor.

In a recent study by Stanford Medicine, researchers proved how wearables could tell when a person was getting sick. They discuss how healthcare providers can use wearables and the data they collect to help individualize medicine – by establishing a unique “baseline,” providers will easily be able to tell when something is wrong.

The future of healthcare, and personalized medicine, and the interconnectedness of it all is exciting. I know that given the option, I would gladly share my FitBit data with my primary care physician. I trust that something I wear every single day that monitors my activity, sleep, and heart rate knows me better than the doctor I visit once a year. I look forward to the day where this is a reality, and all of this incredible data that wearables are collecting can be used to help advance medicine and enrich patient data.

Learn more about some of the ways Stericycle Communication Solutions is closing the gap between patients and their providers here.

The following is a guest blog post by Sarah Bennight, Marketing Strategist of Stericycle Communication Solutionsas part of the Communication Solutions Series of blog posts. Follow and engage with them on Twitter:@StericycleComms
Several months ago, I failed to get up in time for my normal coffee brew. So on the way to work, I decided to stop at a local Starbucks to grab a latte. The drive-thru was packed. Panicking, I stepped inside where the line was sure to be shorter. It was not. As I waited, I noticed folks walking in and going straight to the barista bar, giving an order, and receiving it immediately. No line. No wait. What was this amazing service and why didn’t I receive it? I felt left out of cool kids club as I waited my turn and finally arrived 3 minutes late to work. After searching my junk email, I found several emails touting a new order in app and pay service. With my busy lifestyle and love of coffee, I thought this was too good to be true.

Next time I was running late, I opened the app and ordered my favorite beverage with one hand while putting on makeup with the other. I felt like a true VIP when I sauntered into my local cafe and whispered my order to the barista, who had my drink ready and waiting. You can bet, if I need a coffee on a hurried morning, I will remain loyal to the pre-order app from Starbucks. It’s just too easy.

With increasingly busy lifestyles and the need to complete more in less time, consumers look for the quickest and easiest goods and services. We are much more willing to adventure into unknown spaces if it promises to give us precious time back. After moving last month, I received a card in the mail from a well-known grocer saying “welcome to the neighborhood, we now offer online grocery shopping.” Busy people in my neighborhood are celebrating an end to their most hated and time-consuming weekly errand. I have yet to try this service since there are rarely timeslots open, but the Starbucks’ model of order online and avoid the wait is becoming the norm.

We are so accustomed to immediate service that we sometimes get frustrated with even small delays. Take, for example, my two very different experiences at urgent care centers. Earlier this year, I had to take my daughter in for possible strep throat. I avoided the trip long enough that her primary care physician office was closed and urgent care was the only option. We took our chances with the local pediatric urgent care and waited for our sick child to be seen for over two hours – 45 minutes of which was spent in the examination room before anyone came in to see us.

When the need arose for me to visit an urgent care clinic recently, I was already well versed in the advantages of ordering online without a wait. Although I had been to the local ER for the same condition and they had all of my labs and records, the thought of a potentially lengthy wait was daunting. So, I searched for a clinic that could accommodate my schedule and decided to try a new clinic because they offered the “online ordering model” for urgent care visits. I signed up online and was called back within 10 minutes of arriving at the clinic. The doctor saw me within 15 minutes of being placed in a room. The experience was so positive the clinic has earned my loyalty for future care needs. Not only do they have a caring staff, they get me in and out in a reasonable time.

This trend is rapidly being adopted across commercial industries, but healthcare isn’t far behind. And health providers that aren’t ready to adapt will soon feel the pressure as consumers demand convenience. Services and tools such as Amazon PrimeNow and Disneyland FastPasses prove one thing: Americans simply hate to wait.

Recently, I spoke with a client who made the decision to implement our online scheduling solution as a result of increasingly consumer-driven expectations. Competition with retail clinics for primary care visits also played a role in their decision. They stated, “We are now competing with Walgreens and CVS for simple clinic visits because we make it too difficult to get the patient in the door.” A McKinsey 2015 Consumer Health Insights Survey found the same, as two thirds of the people surveyed reported they would be comfortable using retail clinics such as CVS or Walgreens for care. When asked why, the major reason cited was accessibility.

With two very different clinic visits shaping my view, I imagine on demand access and appointment scheduling will continue to shape the healthcare access scene in the next few years. Convenience is king in our consumer-minded world, and those who rely on only traditional methods of getting patients in the door could miss potential opportunities – or worse, lose existing patients to competitors who provide easier access. I won’t return to the first urgent care clinic because the more recent visit offered better access and a more convenient experience by significantly cutting my wait time. With my new found love for ordering online and avoiding the wait, I have also recently changed the family eye doctor to one who offers this service. Now, if they could only offer an onsite coffee bar…

The following is a guest blog post by Cristina Dafonte, Marketing Associate of Stericycle Communication Solutionsas part of the Communication Solutions Series of blog posts. Follow and engage with them on Twitter:@StericycleComms
This year at MGMA 2016, the Stericycle Communication Solutions team had the opportunity to survey over 800 providers about their patient communication strategy. Getting to collect our own data, rather than relying on facts and figures from scholarly articles, was truly invaluable. But what was even more exciting was sitting down and analyzing the results.

Many of the statistics weren’t surprising – nearly 100% of providers are sending appointment reminders, 60% of providers are using technology to send these reminders, and 2/3 of providers surveyed love the idea of online self-scheduling. These statistics all made sense to me… it’s almost 2017, of course providers would prefer to use technology when it comes to their patient communications.

But as I dug more into the numbers, I saw a startling trend:

Only 1 out of 3 providers who “love” online self-scheduling offer it to their patients

While almost all providers are sending appointment reminders, 1/3 are still manually calling their patients

Over 60% of providers are only sending appointment reminders via ONE modality

I started to think about other parts of my life where I booked appointments or used technology to interact with a vendor– did these healthcare numbers match their non-healthcare counterparts?

First I looked to my hair salon. When I go to their website, I have the ability to book an appointment with my current hair dresser directly on their home screen. I get an email reminder the day that I book the appointment with a calendar attachment. The day before the appointment, I get a text reminding me what time my appointment is and whom it is with. Four months after the appointment, I get an email reminding me that it’s time to come in for my next appointment… with a link to book an appointment online. Surprisingly, this didn’t match what I was seeing in my survey data analysis. When I looked at scheduling an appointment to get my car serviced, I saw the same trend – booking was conveniently online, the communications were all automated, and I received more than one reminder.

So why does there seem to be such a difference when it comes to healthcare communication? Our survey shows that providers like the idea of technology, so, I wonder, why are most providers only going halfway? What is it that is holding them back from fully investing in automated patient communications? According to TIME, the average person looks at his or her phone 46 times per day. As we near 2017, shouldn’t we reach and capture patients where they are engaged and spend most of their time – on their mobile devices and computers?

For more MGMA survey results and a sneak peak into how Stericycle Communication Solutions can help you adopt an automated patient communication strategy, download the infographic here.

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